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Vonage will *NOT* make things easy for you if you try to connect to them from asterisk. I suggest you use a asterisk friendly provider that uses IAX2 instead.

NuFone
VoiceConduits

It works pretty much exactly like a normal phone system, everyone has a cisco 7960 VoiP phone plugged into their ethernet port and their computer plugged into the phone, or a switch on their desk for both. People get extensions, and dial 9 to get out, voicemail system sends you an email with a .wav file (surprisingly small). My phone rings and it's homer simpson saying "I wasn't asleep"... errr or a non-copyright version of someone that sounds like homer simpson...

The system is easy to configure (pay someone to do it initially), easy to monitor, and very powerful and flexible.

We are in Utah, have a 1.5MB DSL and a VPN to our NJ office, and they're just more extensions on the phone system.

We have had a couple problems with Asterisk, our PCI cards are sharing IRQ's and I need to fix that to rid us of a weird beeping.
Also, someone from NJ calling out gets bad calls when we're downloading stuff, We've got a QoS router, but it needs more tweaking.. if only there were 2 of me...

I've used nortel and Intellisomethin pbx's and have always hated them. I love asterisk, and have no plans to return to $20,000 pile of crap windows NT floppy disk everything is $500 extra and technical help is $200/hr phone systems again!

there is a nice link that shows it and it was in the original posting

I started doing this a week ago using Asterisk+NuFone.. hopefully NuFone doesn't have to change their rules any time soon. I thought about setting up a service, but was afraid of the legal consequences. Here's the easiest way to do this: Download and install this CD Xorcom Debian/Asterisk CD ( Linux+Asterisk Debian Distro ) Purchase a DID from Voicepulse Purchase $5.00 worth of minutes from NuFone.net Download the cidspoof.agi script Configure your extensions.conf in Asterisk.. fire it up, call the DID, enter the spoof number and outgoing.. voila. It will end up cost you like $15.00 for a month or 250 minutes worth of spoofing time. =)

This company is probably nothing more than someone running Asterisk, using Nufone for the PSTN service.

A simple php script will dump a callfile into /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing and bridge the two calls together.

Then all you need to do is write something to manage user accounts, and accept paypal payments and bam. You've got camophone.com.

This whole configuration could probably be whipped up in a day.

I got a new setup, bought some Cisco 7960 SIP phones off eBay, hired an Asterisk pro to do the initial setup since I was on a tight timeline. Use nufone for inbound 800 and outbound LD ($.02/minute both ways). And I love it! Our main office is in New Jersey, we're in SLC, UT. They're just extensions on the phone system. Voicemail works, caller ID works, calls sound the same as normal phones.

We do have 6 analog lines with 2 PCI digium cards, which I would NOT do again. The line charge is more than we would ever spend in 800/local calling. I'm evaluating SIP/IAX softphones now. I think I may be free of the curse of the Nortel PBX forever!!

Costs..? $400 built yerself Linux box with a P4/IDE hard drive. $230 per phone on eBay ($220 for phone (incl shipping) $10 for power supply) *these phones are NICE - Cisco 7960 $1200 for Asterisk pro's time (he should charge more! shhhh) total cost for 10 phone system that has more features and works better than any high end Nortel I've ever spend $50k on, $4k

I'm thinking of setting this up for my house, sinc e nufone has a pay as you go $.02/minute plan.

Oh, and I just found out Asterisk automatically creates report logs in .cvs format! w00t! Every day I find something new in Asterisk that I love.

Or their Privacy Notice which states
Offical document coming soon. In short, we do not pulish[sic] or sell your personal informaton

They aren't any better, not will you likely find any provider that has a better TOS.

VOIP is becoming a big business. If you don't like one provider, try a different one. NuFone is a good one. It works extremely well with Asterisk too.

OK, I grok it now. https://www.nufone.net/ I didn't have a clue what this article was talking about before. This looks pretty good.

NuFone is good for outgoing long distance calls. They charge in 15 second increments to many numbers (others are 30 or 60 seconds) and are pretty darned cheap compared to other providers.

I have great luck with Vonage for my local calling (North America, flat rate is like, $45 p/m and gets you all the dandy doodads). I also have Asterisk setup to receive faxes and Email them to me, so far no corrupted pages at all and the bandwidth usage is pretty reasonable.

I have this setup on my Asterisk box (Vonage attaches using an X100P card ($100 from Digium for the real-thing, clones have been spotted for cheap including $0.99 but YMMV), NuFone is native IAX).

Cordless phone is attached using a Grandstream Ata-286, so I can wonder around the house with a cordless headset whilst talking to who-ever using VoIP.

and don't forget to register your number on e164.org, for native voip ;)

This is an incumbment free zone

Set up Asterisk to try an EnumLookup first, then fall back to NuFone or your home landline using a $16 X100P WinModem from DigitNetworks.

Get all your friends to register their phone numbers with E164.org too, it's a free ENUM service that also verifies people's numbers.

Then if you're really feeling groovy, help a local Community Wireless Network deploy an 802.11a backbone with 11g hotspots all over the place ;) Works great with Asterisk and serexpress. :)

I second that.

I am using Asterisk right now to offload our high-volume long distance calls over to Nufone. $0.0295/min anywhere in the continental US and Canada. Great service but not offically open for business yet. Talk to Jerjer in #asterisk on OPN.

Anyway -- Asterisk for the most part works great -- I currently have our Norstar system with four trunk lines going into an Adit600 channel bank to Asterisk. We also have 8 regular PSTN lines which go directly into the KSU. Speed dials are set to pick up a VOIP trunk line. When we move to the new building we will have a PRI going directly into the asterisk box, and a channelized T1 connection between the Norstar system and the Asterisk box. We're only going to have one "real" phone line in the building, with everything else going over VOIP to a colocation place downtown.

Biggest problems with Asterisk (for us) seem to be with VOIP phones, not VOIP calls. Since we're using our regular Norstar system we avoid most of these issues but we are slowly moving to VOIP phones to replace the KSU since we want (much) tighter integration of the phones and computers. You pretty much require end-to-end QoS though for guaranteed reliability and clarity of calls. We do pretty go with having QoS working on both ends of the data T1 such that it's not possible to fill the pipe and cause havoc.

Asterisk is really becoming VERY stable over the past few weeks -- I think there are under 8 bugs open in the bugtracker which are preventing 1.0 stable. (yes I realize how funny that sounds)

Nufone

StealthTele